Everything that surrounds us was once a dream that someone made real. What do we call the people who turn such dreams into reality? Leaders.

When we bought our house, our lawyer found an old envelope in the conveyancing paperwork. In it was an ordnance survey map of the local area. On the map, someone had drawn a small block and an ‘X’, in pencil, in a field, by a farm lane. In the margin, they had written a word: “Ellendene”.

In 1938, the original owners had marked where they would build their house. They imagined it enough to give it a name.

It had been their dream. Someone made it real. And now, after many years, their dream was now our house.

All houses were once dreams. Not all of them have such stories, but for every house ever built, someone had to imagine what it would be.

Then someone had to build it and turn this dream into reality.

For every house, someone did.

It’s not just houses.

Unless we are standing naked in the wilderness (and, perhaps, even then) everything about us was once someone’s dream.

A little while ago – 1988, according to the OED – people started using the word ‘metrics’ in the way we use it today. Businesses took up the term, motivated by a belief that they needed to measure things if they were to manage business performance.

Of course, businesses have always measured what they do. But the advent of lean thinking, global competition and, most of all, the growing adoption of computers and spreadsheets all about this time meant that an organisation that lacked firm control of their business would be (and were) killed off by competitors who had learned to run tighter ships.

So, metrics.

And since then? On the back of Kaplan and Norton’s balanced scorecard (a good thing), Key Performance Indicators (KPIs*) (via Mack Hanan in 1970), Statistical Process Control (SPC) (also a good thing), Six Sigma (a good thing in the right place), Management Information Systems (MIS), Business Intelligence (BI), data analytics, dashboards and now, Big Data, metrics have become an industry. Many businesses employ phalanxes of analysts and banks of computers to ‘crunch the numbers’.

Now in many organisations, the first response to a proposal to do something new or better is “…how will you measure it?” (And not, you’ll notice, “…why do we want to do this?”)

This is a shame.

In business, the things we do, we do because they are important and will make a difference: to our organisation, to our customers, to our people. What we want to achieve, the value we are aiming to get, is much more important than how we choose to measure it.

Yet too many organisations put the metrics cart before the value horse.

Important things get slowed down – or stopped – because we can’t agree on what metrics to use, or we need to wait to set up a reporting mechanism, or we are waiting for our technical people to “…set up the system” so it can measure and report.

The effect is that important things get lost, or are delayed, and the cost of doing business goes up.

Worse, we end up delivering projects that meet their metrics but miss their goal.

In extreme cases, metrics can become a madness that infects almost every business conversation. I once found myself working in an organisation that had 43,000 metrics in place.

Yes, they had the madness so badly that they had measured their metrics.

*Sigh*

Yet here’s the thing. The purpose of metrics isn’t to measure something. Their purpose is to give decision-makers a way to pay attention to something important in our business, over time.

But people can only pay attention to about seven things at a time. Any organisation has a core of a few things to which it needs to pay attention just to keep things going. Money, for example, or customers, or the amount of work we need to do, or quality, or risk.

If we can only pay attention to seven things, we have only a little room to pay attention to anything else: the things we need to change or make better. We need to pick these things to which we want to pay attention very carefully if we want them to succeed. They need to be important.

And if we have to pick our way through hundreds or thousands of metrics, then we can’t focus on these one or two important things. Or if, by some monumental effort of concentration, we can focus on these one or two things, we can only do so for a moment, before we are distracted by something else.

This is one reason why so many important initiatives hit the sand; why ‘Top Management attention’ is so transitory; why we lose sight of our goals in the middle of projects – because too many things are competing for corporate attention.

This is not to say that we don’t need metrics. On the contrary, having the right metrics against good standards with effective, practical and timely mechanisms for reporting them, is more of an imperative than ever. The argument for keeping tight control of business essentials is much stronger now than it ever was in 1988.

We have to begin the conversation about metrics differently. Perhaps we should start by asking what do we need to pay attention to, and why do we need to do so? If we can only play attention to seven things, what are the seven in which we want to invest our time and attention?

The dirty little secret of metrics is this: if they don’t help us to pay attention to the things that are important, then they are a distraction, and are stopping us from running our business properly.

For the key to getting things done in business isn’t to measure things – it is to pay attention to them.

In Toulouse on a quick, one-day assignment to work with the WW management team of a tech company. I dined out last night when I arrived at an open-air bistro by the leafy cobbles of the Place Wilson. Outstanding food, a half-bottle of a ’98 Medoc: a pleasant evening – even if I was dining alone.

I’m here because my client, a multi-billion dollar company that led the world in its field, has lost its way and is looking to set a new direction – while trying to make enough money to stay in business while it sorts things out. In short, they’ve been losing money and need to get better at making it. The problem is: they know what they need to do – they just don’t know how.

They are not alone. It’s an epidemic.

No-one knows how.

Cut costs in rational, practical ways that reduce deadwood and improve efficiency? Absolutely. Identify new markets and develop new products to meet the new demand? Damn straight. Create a customer-centric organisation that delivers ever-better products with consistent speed and quality? Ohhh yeah….

Knowing what to do? That’s the easy bit. How to do it? That’s a different question.

If I am the CEO, I can read the books and go to the business schools and pay the consultants their big fees but I’m worse off than when I began because now I know what I should do, I really do. But thinking about how we can do it is much harder – and it’s a wet Monday morning in February and the numbers are down and the Finance director is quitting and the IT guys are telling me that our great white hope of a CRM system is becoming a great white elephant and there’s a quality problem in Kuala Lumpur and I know that my North American Operations Director is bucking for my job and my inbox tells me I have 223 unread emails and I’m late for the plane to Osaka and any hope I have of thinking about how I solve my real problems is washed away by this daily torrent – and I know Tuesday will only be worse.

I don’t need people to tell me what to do – I need them to tell me how, because I don’t have time (or, often, the capacity) to work that out for myself. And almost all the consultants out there offering to help don’t get this.

Most offer ‘solutions’ – like a new computer system has ever saved a company. (Has one, ever? I’d be delighted to hear about it. In my experience, a new system is more likely to kill, not cure).

If they can’t offer me an IT solution, I can always rent their brains, because they’re so much smarter than me about my business, aren’t they? (huh?) After all, I’ve outsourced everything else, why not outsource my thinking? They’ll write the reports, make their slick presentations, then leave me to get on with it (But I still won’t know how, because they don’t know).

And if this doesn’t work, they’ll offer to do the job for me. Good grief, if I’ve outsourced my thinking, I may as well outsource my role while I’m about it. So they flood us with lots of green, smart-suited graduates with condescending smiles who run around analysing here and workshopping there and (if we let them) eventually running the show with their procedures and their metrics and their systems.

And I still won’t know how to change the business to make it better. (And you know what? Neither will they. If they really wanted to run a business, they would be managers, not consultants…)

The only sustainable way for a business to succeed is for its people think better, more efficiently and more productively about the things that matter – and to do so in ways that drive effective action.

It’s hard and it hurts and most people and most organisations will do anything to avoid to doing it. But it is the secret to cutting through the daily noise and stuff.

To think clearly about issues and, even more importantly, about how to resolve them is, I believe, one of the biggest challenges of leadership.

But if we do it and – better – if we help our colleagues to do it, it’s also among the most enjoyable, interesting and valuable things we can do in business.

Programmes and initiatives are prone to fail. The best way to succeed is through rigorous thinking and relentless attention. This is hard. Getting an organisation do so is the mark of a modern leader.

Management fads. IT systems. Training.

What do these have in common?

Organisations deploy these things when they need to do something better or they need to do something new. Often, these are dressed up as ‘programmes’ or ‘initiatives’.

And they usually fail.

Why?

Two reasons.

First, initiatives lead organisations to stop thinking.

“We don’t have to worry about our problem,” goes the organisational line, “because my new management fad / IT system / training programme is going to fix it for us.”

Wrong. No matter which of these things we do, the problem will still be there.

If we are lucky, our initiative will have given us a tool or an approach or a data set that may make solving the problem easier. that’s all.

Second, they divert attention.

Management fads / IT systems / training programmes tend to be big and visible. Once committed, an organisation’s focus usually shifts from ‘solving the problem’ to ‘delivering the programme’.

This is normal – and almost always a mistake.

The programme is not the problem. These are not the same thing.

When the programme is over, what do you have? Some new management buzzwords or some new IT kit or some nice training materials and a new vocabulary, that’s all. Delivered on time and under budget (if you’re lucky).

The problem? Typically, it’ll still be there.

So what’s the solution?

Only one: an iron will and a relentless focus on solving the problem, not just completing the programme.

THIS IS HARD.

Because it means making our organisations think. Think with rigour. Think deeply. Sometimes for quite a while. This is painful and difficult to do.

And, once we have done this thinking, we need to do the the tough bit. We have to concentrate and pay attention to do the thing we have decided to do. For a long time. Until we solve the problem or we learn that we need to do something else.

This is even harder to do and much more difficult. Hence the need for an ‘iron will’.

Successful, modern leaders are, I believe, those who can get their organisation to do these things relentlessly. They may do other things, sure, but their success stands or falls by their ability to have their organisations think hard and pay attention to the things that matter.

If we don’t think hard, paying attention to a problem is like looking at a house burning down, without working out that the right thing to do is call the fire brigade.

On the other hand, thinking without paying attention to the solution is like knowing we need to call the fire brigade, but allowing ourselves to get distracted before picking up the phone.

Either way, our house burns down.

Yes, of course, we may well need some management tools or some IT or some training.

So does this justify the reported $125bn (or $50.1bn) (or $17bn) which is forecast to be spent on Big Data in 2015? Perhaps, but I doubt it.

I remember another time when data promised us a brave new world. In the olden days of the mid-nineties, the story, cited by sources such as the Financial Times, was how analysis of shopping baskets for a mid-range US store on Friday nights showed a previously unknown correlation between buying beer and buying diapers. This story and others like it made the idea of data mining credible as it promised a whole new world of customer insight and understanding.

The beer/diaper story, it turns out, wasn’t true, but it didn’t stop the stampede.

Companies spent fortunes on things called data warehouses, invested in stuff called knowledge management and we were all supposed to make lots of money by having greater insight into customer behaviour.

Consultants, vendors and the media who were all beating the data mining drum.

The consultants, who told us that this was the next big thing and that we would go out of business without it.

The vendors, who sold us the kit and the software and the maintenance contracts and the patches and who told us that the issue we were complaining about “…was a known bug that would be fixed in the next release…”.

The journalists and the advertisers, who sold ad space and wrote articles about “Making the case for knowledge management” and held conferences with titles like “Data Warehousing: A strategic imperative” or some such.

So we went to the conferences and read the articles and called in the consultants and bought the kit and installed the software and did the management of change and ran the benefits realisation exercises and employed new people with strange job titles and tried, as the dust settled, to see the step change in performance promised to us.

While the drum-majors walked away to do the same thing again with new clients.

Result? Billions of dollars siphoned out from the pockets of companies who were doing real things for customers and into the coffers of these drum-beating companies.

At the time, I recall that the consultants, tech companies and media companies in this space all posting phenomenal revenues.

What I don’t recall is reading so much about the great profits their clients made from all this knowledge management and data mining.

As far as I can tell, the promise of data mining and knowledge management was a promise unkept.

And now we have Big Data.

Perhaps Big Deja Vu might be a better term, because it all sounds very familiar.

The scale, depth, density and timeliness of customer data available to us is magnitudes greater than ever before. Mobile data, geolocation, behavioural antecedents, digital payments, social media and evolution of the web are streets ahead of the consumer purchasing information upon which the promise of data warehousing used to rely.

I just feel we need to think harder about how we want to take advantage of it. The same people are beating the drum and more and more companies are falling into step.

But the drum beat isn’t our drum beat. It’s the beat of market hype, of technologists seeking a market, of consultants seeking The Next Big Thing.

It’s not the drum beat of the customer.

What customer insight are we missing? Why does it matter? What could we do better for customers if we had it?

And (this is the kicker) what difference will it make? Really?

If we are to avoid being vendor victims, we should begin – as always – with the customer. And if we can answer these questions properly, then perhaps Big Data may really be of value to customers and to the companies that sell to them – and not just to those who are selling tickets to the Big Data bandwagon.

It is only a matter of time before some sites simply use our social identity, online behaviour, some statements of preference and history of other purchases to predict the best purchase solutions for us and offer a focused choice that’s right for us, based on who we are.

More than a search based on budget, distance from home, type of hotel preference and preferred flight times, this is a search based on what we genuinely want and like, evidenced by our behaviour.

This is, I believe, the kind of thing that will be enabled through the data gathering and machine learning capabilities of facilities like Google Now or Amazon Echo. I think we will start to see these services being offered in 2015.

Before long, we won’t be typing in “…washing machine reviews…” when we want to think about replacing our white goods. We’ll simply muse out loud, in our living room: “Alexa? What washing machine would be best for me?”

We will start to see fresh food delivery online at scale from non-grocers

Building a distributed, refrigerated real-time supply chain to distribute fresh food is expensive and difficult. This has acted as a major barrier to entry for online players. It has kept traditional grocery supermarkets in the game and let them sell us all the other household stuff we need routinely.

At least one traditional supermarket will experiment with a alternative models

Of course, traditional supermarkets are no mugs. They will experiment with new ideas to ‘lock in’ our weekly shop and keep it away from online pretenders. Tesco already have a subscription model for online delivery charges. I would be surprised if they, or their competitors, didn’t come up with an alternative. A single monthly subscription that delivers a weekly food shop, for example?

Health insurers will offer discounts for customers to upload their health data activities.

This one is, I think, already happening. Wearables, and the health monitoring facilities offered by the iPhone 6, all gather data about our long-term lifestyles.

Health insurers are beginning to incentivise us to upload this data to the cloud. Health insurers will analyse this data and give us bespoke cover at tailored premiums. And we will like it. (unless we’re fat, or sedentary, in which case our premiums will shoot up).

Wearable tech will cause at least one Big Data / privacy scandal

Wearables are probably the first tech innovation designed from the ground up to enable ‘Big Data. Just by wearing a watch or wristband, our movements yield long-term telemetry data.

Where we go, what we do, who we meet, what we are interested in, when we do things, how we get there, what we buy, how we pay and who we tell – this so-called ‘digital exhaust’ trails behind us as we live.

Buyers of customer experience management software will get wise to the idea that there is no such thing

Leading, managing and operating an organisation to offer a good customer experience is not about software. It is a matter of principle, strategy, practice and attention. I expect that more companies will understand this in 2015.

Banks will claim to be customer-centric but scandals will continue to disprove this idea

But I fear that this hope will founder, for two reasons. First, a typical bank IT system is a messy legacy stack that is hardwired around products, not customers. These systems are too big and too complex to change without eye-watering expense.

Second, the majority of banks continue to reward their people to focus on short-term revenues for the bank, regardless of the interests of the customer. Because these rewards are so big, they will continue to distort banker behaviour away from the customer.

Some brands will begin to function as marketing algorithms

The lines between ‘pure’ marketing and customer experience continue to blur. Marketers have been trying for years to personalise their messaging to individual consumers. I think this year, we will start seeing the first marketing content, bespoke for individual customers, automatically generated by what marketing systems know about each customer.

What will make these communications different? They will be driven by specific parameters that properly reflect the intent of the brand.

While the content of all these emails may be different for EVERY customer, each will reflect the presentation, tone of voice and content of the brand. The brand will have become an algorithm, driving content.

What are your predictions?

So these are my predictions for the year. Things will, I think, get better in incremental ways for the customer as more companies recognise the competitive advantage this gives them. We’ll see a few new things, and some ideas will fail (and that’s ok, failure is the overhead of innovation and the cost of progress) and a number of things will surprise us.

What do you think? What do you predict customers will see differently in 2015?

*The link takes you to a cool interactive tool by Google that shows how the purchase journey varies for customers in different market segments and countries. Fun to play with (if you like that kind of thing).

We were snowbound at a corporate retreat in Princeton, New Jersey. We had exhausted the formal agenda and were waiting to hear if the snowploughs had freed the I-95 so that we could get to the airport and go home.

So we were having a few beers and having a general discussion about what works for us in business when Kevin, an experienced colleague who worked in our manufacturing practice, said something so true and so simple that it has stuck with me at every step of my career since.

We were talking about creating and keeping customer relationships, and he said: “Every time I’m going to meet someone for business, before I go in, I ask myself, ‘how can I create value for them in this meeting?’ If I can do this, I know they’ll want to meet me again. They’ll learn to trust me. And, when the time is right, they’ll buy from me.”

The snowploughs came and we put down our beers and caught our planes home, but his simple mantra – ‘how can I create value for my customers each time we meet?’ – has served me well since then.

Because this is the secret of customer experience.

If we want to make the customer experience better, it’s simple. We make every customer encounter something that our customer values. Then we repeat for every step of the encounter.

Offering control to our customer (of the conversation, of the transaction)

Making it so that there is only one way for the customer to do something – and it’s always good

Being patient

Making it easy to pay

Making it easy to get money back

Pricing fairly

Being consistent

Making it easy to talk to a person (if that is what our customer wants)

Making it easy not to have to talk to a person (if that is what our customer wants)

Making it easy for the customer to change their mind

Welcoming returns with a smile

Improvising if the customer needs it

Anticipating their questions (nicely)

Listening to them. REALLY listening. (Note: this one is hard).

Being honest

If we can’t do it, saying so

If someone else can do it better or cheaper, saying so

Pricing things in ways that are clear and easy to understand

No surprises – being up front with bad news and what we are doing to fix it

If there is a quick or cheap fix for their problem, solving it for them

Refusing to sell them the wrong thing

Keeping our promises, no matter how small (especially the small ones)

Being interesting

Being funny (but not offensive)

Speak about their problems more than our solutions

Helping

Explaining what is happening and what will happen next

Putting ourselves in their shoes

Giving them meaningful choices

Tailoring what we do to what they want

Keeping their anonymity (if that is what they want)

Reassuring them

Taking responsibility for sorting things out, even if it is not our fault

Solving their problems quickly and consistently

Giving them something

Offering something extra (a lagniappe, for example)

Giving away insight or knowledge because the customer needs help

Letting them take the credit

Giving them things because we think they might like them

Making it cheaper because they’ve come back

Accepting that if they have got things wrong, it’s our fault for allowing it to happen

Speed

Being fast

Being instant

Letting them be slow. Waiting for them. Patiently. And with a smile.

Being convenient in ways that matter to them

Asking them how quickly they want it and getting it to them whenever they say

Each of these will make the customer experience better. Better, customers will value dealing with us. And if there’s value, they’ll be willing to buy from us. And they’ll want to do it again. And this is the bottom-line reason why customer experience matters.